Gates: No more $$ to rightist legislative group

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, on Monday, joined several large corporations in ceasing financial support from a ultra-conservative, pro-business national organization of state legislators.

Coca-Cola, Kraft Foods and Intuit Inc. have announced in recent days that they will no longer provide money to the American Legislative Exchange Council.

The Gates Foundation was not a member of ALEC, which has provided a drafting hand in such statutes as Florida’s Stand Your Ground law and new voter ID requirements in states that target students, the elderly and minority voters.

“We have made a single grant, narrowly and specifically focused on providing information to ALEC-affiliated state legislators on teacher effectiveness and school financing,” Chris Williams of the Gates Foundation told RollCall.com

The Gates Foundation has paid no corporate dues to ALEC. The grant by the Seattle-based foundation totaled $375,000.

Such progressive groups as Color of Change, which previously asked advertisers to withdraw from Glenn Beck’s show on Fox News, are spearheading the drive to deprive ALEC of corporate support.

In announcing an end to its membership, Coca-Cola said last week: ”Our involvement with ALEC was focused on effort to oppose discriminatory food and beverage taxes, not on issues that have no direct bearing on our business.”

(Coca-Cola has a major environmental project, working with the World Wildlife Foundation in protecting polar bear habitat in Canada’s far north, likely to become the great bears’ last redoubt if global warming melts most of their ice pack habitat.)

ALEC has specialized in hosting all-expenses-paid conferences that bring together conservative legislators — almost, but not all, Republicans — and representatives of corporations.

They have combined to draft legislation in a varied of fields. Arizona’s controversial immigration laws were an ALEC product, along with state-level legislation to relax environment and safety regulations in the energy industry. Koch Industries and Exxon-Mobil are active members of the group.

State Sen. Val Stevens, R-Arlington, the Legislature’s most outspoken gay rights critic, is a former ALEC board member. Bob Williams, founder of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation in Olympia, has served on its board of scholars.